Here’s an interesting link-up/post on Obama and Yucca Mountain by Edward John Craig @ Planet Gore blog @ National Review Online. After he quotes Max Schulz in the D.C. Examiner, Craig quips, “A northern liberal equating elite opinion with public opinion? Nah . . . never happens.”
Obama on Yucca Mountain
[Edward John Craig writes] Max Schulz in the D.C. Examiner suggests that Obama has a bad read on Nevada voters’ position on Yucca Mountain.
Obama is gambling that his anti-Yucca stance will put Nevada in his column. Conventional wisdom holds that Obama has taken the safer bet. Yet it’s actually a risky strategy, based on the highly questionable assumption that Nevada voters oppose Yucca Mountain as fervently as do the state’s elected officials. The last two presidential elections suggest they don’t.
In 2000, Yucca supporter Bush took the state with more votes than opponents Gore and Ralph Nader combined. Those five electoral votes were the difference between victory and defeat.
Shortly after taking office, Bush pushed Yucca Mountain legislation through Congress, sparking fresh outrage from Nevada’s political leaders. It didn’t matter. In the 2004 presidential election, Bush again won the Silver State. Incredibly, he tallied nearly 39 percent more votes than four years before.
A big problem with Obama’s reflexive Democratic opposition to Yucca Mountain is that he proposes no viable alternatives at a time when Washington is on the hook for an answer to the nuclear waste question.
Failure to come up with a workable solution throws a wrench into plans to revive nuclear power’s fortunes just when voters are increasingly worried about climate change and over-reliance on foreign energy sources.
Without an alternative proposal, Obama’s pro-nuclear comments are merely lip service. That could have ramifications in states other than Nevada. All signs point to a public and an investment climate increasingly supportive of nuclear power.
Obama is a savvy politician who for two years has run a nearly flawless campaign for the White House. He is also known to be a pretty good poker player. But with his opposition to Yucca Mountain, as with his dissembling on offshore drilling, he looks to have played the energy card all wrong. It just might cost him a big pot on November 4.
Tags: anti-Yucca, bet, Blogs of Nevada, election, gamble, Obama, opinion, Politics, polls, strategy, voters, Yucca
From today’s Nevada News & Views:
LETHAL WEAPON NO MORE
Harry Reid declared the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository dead…just before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave a “green light” to move forward with the final stage of the licensing process and dismissing a challenge to it by the state of Nevada.
Then Obama began running ads attacking John McCain on his pro-Yucca Mountain stance, figuring it would do electoral harm to the GOP nominee’s chances in Nevada…just before a new poll came out showing that less than one in four voters saying the Yucca Mountain issue would have a major influence on their votes. And 38 percent of them said the issue wouldn’t effect their vote one way or the other whatsoever.
It’s starting to look like the proverbial “third rail” of Nevada politics isn’t quite so lethal any longer.
Tags: Blogs of Nevada, licensing, McCain, NRC, nuclear, Obama, poll, Reid, repository, voters, waste, Yucca Mountain
As I noted in a post the other day, Republicans have historically tended to be more reliable voters than Democrats, i.e. they show up at the booth with a lot less prompting and prodding. This is a factor that cannot be left out of the registration equation. Democrat campaign managers need to figure out how many registered Democratic voters are needed to equal/exceed one Republican vote. Because it is an issue of quality over quantity, it is not going to be a one-to-one correlation.
On this subject, NV Senator Bob Beers has some comments on all the media attention the voter registration issue is getting. He notes that while much Ado has been made about the voter registration gains made by Democrats in the past year (here and here and here), some Republicans see it another way:
The hyper-aggressive Democrat voter registration program, funded by Harry Reid’s millions in advance of his 2010 re-election or election of his son in his place, seems to have been focusing on that peculiar brand of ultra-transient new resident, most of whom have probably moved home in the wake of the flattening of Nevada’s once-thriving job market.
Some contend the Democrat voter registration program has become so aggressive that it has taken to registering people who do not actually exist.
The majority of existing voters who are changing their party affiliation to Democrat had been registered Non-Partisan. Those people probably were already voting Democrat, so changing their registrations won’t have much impact on November end-of-season voting, though it will cause an increase in the raw number of Democrats who vote in primaries.
As case-and-point, Beers points to the primary balloting…particularly in the Porter-Titus congressional district, where more Republicans voted than did Democrats. 26,892 Republicans voted compared to 26,241 Democrats despite all the buzz re: the massive registration lead Democrats had supposedly built in that district.
Below Beers shows the trend in some other districts where there was both a Democrat and Republican primary:
Tags: aggressive, articles about, ballotting, Blogs of Nevada, Bob Beers, Democrat, Democratic, election, gains, GOP, Independent, Media, Non-Partisan, November, party affiliation, primary, Republican, voter registration, voters
